Cabinet Secretary Edano Yukio, stated that no one should enter the 20km (12.4 miles) evacuation zone around Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
The reason; high radiation contamination. The situation has gotten much worse now that it looks like partial melt down of reactor cores. Reactor 2 is thought to have experienced partial melt down.
TEPCo officials now admitting that the cause of the high radiation, and the leaking of deadly water into the turbine rooms, might be the result of fuel rods in the reactors melting. The deadly water has been found in reactors 1, 2, 3 & 4 turbine rooms.
Specifically it is believed reactor 2 is at least in partial melt down. Cabinet Secretary, Edano Yukio, said the partial melt down was temporary.
Those people who voluntarily evacuated are being told, that for now, they can not return to their homes.
Officials from Nevada, California, Hawaii, Colorado, Massachusetts and Washington state, are reporting small levels of radiation that can be traced to Japan have been detected.
Iceland officials are reporting the same thing.
A monitoring station near the Las Vegas Atomic Testing Museum, reported iodine-131 and xenon-133. University of Nevada reported cesium-137 between March 17 and 21.
Public health officials in Massachusetts detected iodine-131 in rain water. Officials in California and Washington state also confirm iodine-131 in rain.
In Iceland officials say that, so far, the radiation levels detected there are less than after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. They made that statement on March 23. Now there is evidence that plutonium is leaking from the Fukushima Daiichi plant.
How many nuclear power plants in the north east of Honshu? I counted three. The importance is that the area continues to get hit with quakes, and small tsunamis.
Miyagi Prefecture has one nuclear plant, Onagawa, with three reactors.
Fukushima Prefecture has two pants, Daiichi & DaiNi. Daiichi has six reactors, DaiNi has four reactors. Daiichi is the plant that is about to make Chernobyl look good.
Aomori Prefecture had a nuclear plant under construction, but Tokyo Electric ceased construction because of the disaster at Daiichi.
Tokyo Electric Power Company runs the Fukushima plants. Oganawa is run by Tohoku Electric Power Company. Both could be called TEPCo, but they are different companies.
“I think maybe the situation is much more serious than we were led to believe. This is far beyond what one nation can handle – it needs to be bumped up to the UN Security Council. In my humble opinion, this is more important than the Libya no fly zone.” -Meshkati Najmedin, of the University of Southern California
Meshkati is correct! Tokyo Electric Power Company now says they can not resume attempts to cool the reactors, due to “…high radiation density..”.
“Regrettably, we don’t have a concrete schedule at the moment to enable us to say in how many months or years (the crisis will be over).”-Muto Sakae, TEPCo vice-president
What’s the problem now? The reactor cores are leaking, the water is deadly radioactive, no one can work around the reactors. TEPCo officials thought they could pump the deadly water into the condenser units, but guess what? They’re already full of water! They can’t just dump the deadly water because it’s so deadly. That’s why they were hoping to pump it into the condenser units. I guess they forgot they in use before the 11 March 2011 disaster. Now they want to try to dump the water already in the condensers and then pump the deadly water into the condensers. But this is now a race against time. The longer this takes the more contamination, including plutonium, is spread, through the air and water. Also, this could lead to full melt down of three reactors, worse than Chernobyl.
Guess what long term solution is being proposed? Dump sand and concrete on the SOB! And that’s a long term solution.
TEPCo says it will conduct another test of the leaked water at Fukushima Daiichi, reactor 2’s turbine building. The reading for iodine-134 (has a shorter half life than iodine-131) announced earlier was actually for another isotope that has a longer half-life.
TEPCo officials say the level of 10 million times more than normal is incorrect, but the radiation levels being emitted are still 1,000 millisieverts (1 million microsieverts) per hour! If the radiation is from an isotope with a longer half life than iodine-134, that still makes it real bad.
Can’t these corporate buffoons get anything right?
TEPCo said radiation 10 million times the normal level was detected in water that leaked into Reactor 2’s turbine housing unit!
Workers were struggling to pump out water, but had to evacuate because of the high radiation levels.
Cabinet Secretary, Edano Yuki, announced that national police are being sent in to 20-30km evacuation/disaster zones.
Edano said that radiation levels are so high at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant that work must be halted until the contamination can be removed. Soil samples around the area show rapidly increasing radiation contamination.
Japanese government will now evacuate those who want to voluntarily evacuate, but don’t have the means to do so. The national police will try to contact people who are still in the zones that have been designated “stay indoors” zones. All options open.
Medical teams from around the world are now being sent into the zones.
Japanese government expects more “difficulties”. Japanese government admitting that financing for any recovery from the nuclear disaster will be a problem.
Interviewed by CNN Bill Nye the Science Guy was asked if he was calling Fukushima Daiichi another Chernobyl. His answer: “I am, yeah!”
Nye explained that the only way the reactors can be emitting such high levels of radiation is that deadly plutonium is getting out. Plutonium is created when the uranium fuel is “jolted” during the production of electrical power.
His answer to the problem? Dump concrete on the reactors, just like the Soviets did with Chernobyl. Nye explained there is no way to “repair” damaged reactor cores. This is the main problem with nuclear reactors!
I’m saying this is worse than Chernobyl, because Chernobyl involved ONE reactor. Fukushima Daiichi has THREE reactors showing signs of damaged cores! From the beginning of this nuclear disaster, the Russians and Ukrainians (who have first hand experience with Chernobyl) have been saying Fukushima Daiichi will be worse than Chernobyl!
For weeks nuclear officials wanted to get water into the reactors, of the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Now they’re trying to get it out.
It looks like the problem is that they used salty sea water to cool the reactors. It helped to keep the reactors cool enough, but it created pressure inside the reactor chambers. Now it looks like the three reactor cores have sprung leaks, flooding the basements of the reactors with highly radioactive water. Already 3 people went to the hospital, at least two of them had Beta Burns.
The radioactive water is flooding into the Pacific Ocean. Any further work on the reactors is held up because of the high levels of radiation.